A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Perceptions of Cuteness and Kawaii Between American and Japanese College Students

Abstract

The notion of kawaii (cuteness in the context of Japanese culture) is ubiquitous in Japan and ranges from Hello Kitty products to road signs to posters created by the Japanese government, to name just a few examples. Japanese products, which are used globally, are consciously tailored to accommodate widely preferred cuteness. Therefore, when designing a product, it is important to understand how specific groups of target users perceive kawaii. We report on a cross-cultural study that investigates cultural differences in the core understanding of the concepts of kawaii and cute based on a free-association study. Following a similar protocol that was previously used with Japanese college students, we asked American college students to write freely about what they associate with the word “cute” and, also, what they associate with the word “kawaii”. Some of the American college students were enrolled in a three-week immersive course entitled “Japanese Culture, Technology and Design” which included two weeks of travel in Japan. These students responded to the prompts on the first day of class and again on the last day of class. Responses to each prompt were coded and compared across cultures and genders.

1 Introduction

Japanese cuteness, described as kawaii, has been ingrained in Japanese contemporary society in many forms. The notion of kawaii is ubiquitous in Japan and ranges from Hello Kitty products to road signs to posters created by the Japanese government, to name just a few examples. Japanese products are consciously tailored to accommodate widely preferred “cuteness”.

The word kawaii stemmed from the word kawayushi that appeared in Konjaku Momogatarishu (Tales of Times Now Past) in classical Japanese literature [1]. At this time, the word kawaii meant pitiful, shameful, or too sad to see. Over the course of Japanese history, the meaning of the word evolved to describe the small, weak, and someone or something that invokes the feeling of “wanting to protect” [1]. The meaning of kawaii has been extended to the concept of “Japanese cuteness” in contemporary Japanese society. It is one of the aesthetic principles that appeal to Japanese consumers. Japanese products and pop culture, such as Hello Kitty, Pokémon, J-pop, and Anime, have gained popularity around the globe, including in the United States. As a result, Japanese kawaii design has also spread to some extent. Good summaries of the role of kawaii in Japanese product design can be found in [2, 3], and [4].

In previous work [5], we report on the extent to which perceptions of kawaii, beauty, and likeability in more than 200 photographs differ between Japanese and American college students. The photographs were divided into subgroups including products, objects, foods, geometric shapes, animals, characters and people. Perceptions of each image were compared across cultures and genders. Specifically, comparisons were made between: Japanese males versus Japanese females, American males versus American females, Japanese males versus American males, Japanese females versus American females, and all Japanese students versus all American students. Differences were found between groups for specific images.

We now extend this work by reporting on a new cross-cultural study that uses a free-association technique to investigate cultural and gender differences in the core understanding of the concepts of kawaii and cute. Japanese and American college students were asked to write freely about what they associate with the word “cute” and, also, what they associate with the word “kawaii”. Some of the American college students were enrolled in a three-week January Term course entitled “Japanese Culture, Technology and Design” which included two weeks of travel in Japan. These students responded to the prompts on the first day of class and again on the last day of class. Responses to each question were coded (for example, did a response refer to an animal, a human, a color, etc.?) and compared across cultures.

2 Method

2.1 Summary of Previous Study

As reported in their paper, Gender Difference in the Free Association for “Cute” and “Kawaii”, the third and fourth authors used a free association technique to compare differences in core understanding of the words “cute” and “kawaii” [6]. The 60 participants (45 males and 15 females) in this study were all Japanese college students. The participants were given 20 min to write what they associate with the word “cute” and, also, what they associate with the word “kawaii”. All participants completed the task before the 20-min. time limit was reached. It is important to note that the word “cute” in Japanese is written as using a special script called Katakana that indicates that the word is a loan word (foreign word). The word is written in Katakana as “キュート”, which is pronounced “kyūto” in Japanese. Thus, the Japanese participants were responding to a prompt for kawaii (written in Japanese) and a prompt for “kyūto” written in a script that is used for loan words. The method for the Japanese study is described in detail in [6].

2.2 Method for Current Baseline Study

Participants for the current study were recruited from students enrolled in Winter Term courses at DePauw University, which is an undergraduate, residential, liberal arts college in the Midwestern United States. Due to University Institutional Review Board requirements, in order to be eligible for the study, participants had to be at least 18 years of age.

In total, 34 students participated in the baseline study at DePauw University during January, 2019. Out of the 34 students, 26 were about to start a course entitled “Japanese Culture, Technology and Design” taught by the first two authors. Five of the 34 participants reported that they had been raised primarily outside of the United States. In order to limit the study to students who would respond primarily through an American cultural lens, we excluded data for these participants. In the remainder of this paper, for convenience, we will refer to the remaining participants as “American” participants since they were raised primarily in the United States, even though we did not ask them about citizenship. The 29 American participants ranged in age from 18 to 23 with a mean age of 20.2. Of the 29 American participants, 13 identified as female and 16 identified as male.

After completing an informed consent form, participants were given a questionnaire that asked for demographic information including gender, age, and number of years spent living outside of the United States. The questionnaire also gave students these instructions: “Please write what you associate with the words cute and kawaii. Your associations can be proper nouns, adjectives, or short sentences. Please write freely words that come to your mind. It is ok to use the same word, phrase, or short sentence for both “cute” and “kawaii”. The questionnaire provided an area for the participants to respond to each of the two prompts and participants were allowed to jump back and forth between the two prompts as they completed the task.

Participants were given a maximum of 20 min to complete their listings; however, all of the participants completed their work before the time limit. As reported in [6], the Japanese participants also all completed their listings before their 20-min time limit expired.

2.3 Method for Post-course Study

As described in detail in [7] and [8], the first and second authors regularly teach a course called “Japanese Culture, Technology and Design” that exposes undergraduate students at an American liberal arts college to Japanese culture, technology and design through an immersive three-week experience that includes two weeks of travel to Japan.

Of the 31 participants in the American study described above, 26 students participated in the Japanese Culture Technology and Design course immediately after participating in the study. In the remainder of this section, we briefly describe the Japanese Culture, Technology and Design course to provide context for the Results and Analysis section that follows.

The Japanese Culture, Technology and Design course exposes students to Japanese history, language, culture, technology and design with an emphasis on the way these three areas are interrelated. The course has been offered four times, most recently in January 2019, with an enrollment of approximately 100 students across the four offerings. Co-teaching the course allows us to combine experience with computer science, human computer interaction, design, and robotics (first author) and Japanese language, Japanese culture, Japanese aesthetics and Japanese history (second author).

The course begins with four days of on-campus orientation, which includes a presentation about Japanese kawaii culture, approximately two weeks on-site in Japan, and an on-campus debriefing session upon return from Japan.

While in Japan, students are exposed to Japanese culture, technology and design (including kawaii) in a variety of contexts and locations. More specifically, the students spend three days at a homestay in a small rural town, five days in Tokyo with an emphasis on contemporary technology and robotics, one day in Nagoya with an emphasis on industry, four days in Kyoto with an emphasis on more traditional design and one day in Hiroshima largely thinking about ethical issues associated with design. More details about the travel course are reported in [7]. During our time in Japan, the group communicates using LINE, a social media software system that is popular in Japan. LINE’s user interface is itself kawaii, which exposes students to kawaii in an additional context. Additional information about our use of use LINE software to support the travel course are reported in [8].

After returning from Japan at the end of the most recent course offering, the students were invited to respond to the cute and kawaii free-association prompts again, using the same methodology as previously described. All 26 course participants responded to the prompts. As explained previously, data from two students were excluded because the students had been raised outside of the United States.

3 Results and Analysis

3.1 Baseline Questionnaire Results and Analysis

On the pre-course baseline questionnaire, all American participants wrote at least one item in response to the prompt asking for associations with cute. However, nearly half (45%) of the American participants (7 of 13 females and 6 of 16 males) left the prompt for kawaii associations blank. This demonstrates that an understanding of kawaii is specialized knowledge for American college students with some Americans learning about this concept and others not becoming aware of it.

On the other hand, all of the Japanese participants were able to respond to the prompt for kawaii and all but one participant (59 out of 60) were able to respond to the prompt for cute. This demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Japanese college students are familiar with the word cute.

As reported in [6] there are some differences in the way Japanese college students perceive cute as compared to the way they perceive kawaii. In particular, the authors conclude that “Kawaii is a Japanese word that has an everyday life as a background context, while Cute is a quasi-Japanese word that has some distance from the everyday life.” For the American students, however, cute is clearly an English word with background context provided by everyday life. Kawaii, on the other hand, is a foreign concept that must be learned.

In the remainder of this section we compare American and Japanese participants with respect to the associations they made in response to the prompt related to “cute”. In the next section, we consider differences between cultures with regard to kawaii, however when considering differences about kawaii, we use data that was gathered from American students after they were exposed to this concept.

Returning to the cross cultural comparison of cute using the pre-course baseline data for American students, Table 1 compares the mean number of associations with cute that were provided by American participants versus Japanese participants. Since it is widely believed that perceptions of cuteness vary by gender, this data is disaggregated by gender as well.

Table 1. Cross-cultural comparison of mean number of responses to “cute”

Because of the small number of American subjects in this pilot study, statistical tests are difficult and we will focus on quantitative trends and qualitative analysis in this paper. In this context, the data suggests that for both Americans and Japanese, females made more associations in response to the cute prompt than males. In addition, Japanese participants made more associations than their American counterparts.

The study involving Japanese participants categorized each response into one of 17 categories as provided below in alphabetical order along with examples for each category. This category list is taken with only minor edits from [6].

• 1. Adjective: e.g. small, lovely

• 2. Animal: e.g. cat, dog

• 3. Character: e.g. Hello-Kitty, Disney Princess

• 4. Clothes and Fashion: e.g. gothic Lolita, China dress

• 5. Color: e.g. pink, pale color

• 6. Foreign Items: e.g. European things, overseas items

• 7. Human: e.g. girl, idols

• 8. Letter: e.g. Hiragana

• 9. Onomatopoeic Expressions: e.g. fuwa-fuwa, hira-hira, aww

• 10. Ornaments and Accessory: e.g. accessory, eyeglass

• 11. Person’s Name: e.g. Avril Lavigne, Ayame Goriki

• 12. Place: e.g. Harajuku, Tokyo

• 13. Plant: e.g. flower, tulip

• 14. Shape and Pattern: e.g. stripe, star

• 15. Sweets and Fruits: e.g. short cake, cinnamon roll

• 16. Toy and Equipment: e.g. doll, stuffed animal

• 17. Others: e.g. car, painting

We coded the American responses into these 17 categories as well, but found we needed to add a new category, which we denote by “18. Special: e.g., big eyes”. The Special category will be useful in explaining results that are reported in the next section of this paper.

As reported in [6] Japanese females (N = 15) made a total of 213 responses for cute while Japanese males (N = 45) made a total of 244 responses for cute. American females (N = 13) made a total of 152 responses for cute while American males (N = 16) made a total of 116 responses for cute. Table 2 shows the percentage of total responses per category. For example, the first row of the table indicates that 46.7% of the total responses made by American females were categorized as adjectives, 33.6% of the responses made by American males were categorized as adjectives, 15.5% of the responses made by Japanese females were adjectives, and 10.7% of the responses made by Japanese males were adjectives. We have highlighted entries in Table 2 that exceed 5%. These entries are the most important to consider and will be discussed in more detail below. We do not highlight entries in the “Other” category since it is comprised of a collection of unrelated items.

Table 2. Percentage of total cute associations for each category

Table 3 presents the top three categories for each demographic, as well as the percentage of associations for with each category and the total percentage of associations covered by the top three categories in aggregate.

Table 3. Comparison of top three cute categories by demographic group

The Character category is in the top three categories for both Japanese males and Japanese females, but makes up less than 1% of the responses for both American males and females. Example responses in the character category for Japanese participants were numerous (25 responses from females and 38 from males) and included both Japanese and American characters such as Hello Kitty, Mickey Mouse, Pooh and Yura Chara. No American males and only one American female offered a Character as a response (this single response was Pusheen, which is a cat character).

Tables 2 and 3 suggest that Japanese participants, and especially Japanese females, have a broader definition of cute than American participants. For example, if we augment the top three categories for Japanese males (Animal 21.7%, Human 17.2%, Character 15.6%) with the next three most popular categories (Adjective 10.7, Color 6.6%, Sweets and Fruits 4.5%) the result is a cumulative coverage of 76.3% for the top three categories, which is still short of the coverage obtained by just the top three categories for both American males and American females.

More dramatically, if we augment the top three categories for Japanese females (Adjectives 15.5%, Character 13.1%, and Human 12.7%) with the next three most popular categories (Colors 9.4% and Ornaments/Accessory 8.0%, Animal 6.6%) the result is a cumulative coverage of 64.7% for the top six categories, which is far short of the coverage provided by the top three categories for both American females and American males and is also short of the coverage provided by the top six categories for Japanese males. Looking at the data in another way, there are nine categories that each garner at least 5% of the responses for Japanese females. However, there are only three categories above 5% for American females, three categories excluding “Other” above 5% for American males, and five categories above 5% for Japanese males.

It is worth noting that some categories, especially the adjective category, involve interactions with other categories. For example, across males and females, the American data includes 42 responses that were categorized as animals. Examples include dogs, cats, puppies, kittens, baby animals, small harmless animals, plump animals and foxes. Out of the 42 responses that were coded as animals, 14 (33%) suggested a small animal. Examples include: baby animals, small animals, kittens, puppy and puppies. While these responses were coded as animals, they also explicitly or implicitly imply the adjective “small”. Similar interactions also occur in the Human categories, most notably with the responses “baby” or “babies” which were coded as humans. The Adjective category contains 109 responses across the male and female American data. This includes 21 responses (19%) that explicitly or implicitly suggest small size such as childish, miniature, petite, small, tiny, young and youthful. Therefore, it is not surprising that pairing these often show up in other Categories.

3.2 Follow-Up Questionnaire Results and Analysis

As reported in [6] Japanese females (N = 15) made a total of 305 responses for kawaii while Japanese males (N = 45) made a total of 406 responses for kawaii. After completing the three-week immersive course “Japanese Culture, Technology and Design,” American females (N = 9) made a total of 91 responses for kawaii while American males (N = 15) made a total of 122 responses for kawaii. Table 4 compares the mean number of associations with kawaii that were provided by American participants versus Japanese participants. Since it is widely believed that perceptions of cuteness vary by gender, this data is disaggregated by gender as well. It is worth noting that the mean number of associations made by Japanese females was approximately double the mean number of associations made by Japanese males and by both American males and females. This may be because kawaii is considered a somewhat feminine concept in Japan.

Table 4. Cross-cultural comparison of mean number of responses to “kawaii”

Table 5 shows the percentage of total responses per category. For example, the first row of the table indicates that 25.3% of the total responses made by American females were categorized as adjectives, 24.6% of the responses made by American males were categorized as adjectives, 20.7% of the responses made by Japanese females were adjectives, and 6.2% of the responses made by Japanese Males were adjectives. We have highlighted entries in Table 2 that exceed 5%. These entries are the most important to consider and will be discussed in more detail below. We do not highlight entries in the “Other” category since it is comprised of a collection of unrelated items.

Table 5. Percentage of total cute associations for each category

Table 6 presents the top three categories for each demographic, as well as the percentage of associations for with each category and the total percentage of associations covered by the top three categories in aggregate.

Table 6. Comparison of top three kawaii categories by demographic group

All demographic groups, except Japanese males, make the most associations to adjectives. Additionally, Character which was in the top three ranking with respect to cute for both Japanese males and Japanese females (see Table 3) has fallen considerably for Japanese females. Thus, Japanese females seem to consider items that are categorized as Character to be more cute than kawaii.

On the other hand, Character had less than 1% of the cute associations for both American males and American females (see Table 3) yet Character makes the top three association list with respect to kawaii for both American males and American females. Thus, these groups appear to consider items categorized as Character to be more kawaii than cute. While Japanese participants list a mixture of Japanese and foreign Characters (Hello Kitty, but also Pooh and Mickey Mouse), the American participants list almost exclusively characters that are associated with Japan. In particular, not a single Disney Character is on the list. This reinforces the notion that American participants consider kawaii to be a foreign term.

This idea is reinforced by considering the category “Special,” which includes the subcategories “Manga and Anime”, “Japanese”, and “big eyes”. The subcategory of “Manga and Anime” indicates that the responses were directly related to either Manga or Anime. Those responses that clearly mention that the kawaii concept is Japanese were placed into the subcategory of “Japanese.” Lastly, but quite interestingly, several American participants described kawaii with “big eyes” and thus stands as an independent subcategory of Special.

4 Discussion

As noted earlier, most of the American participants were not able to make associations with the concept of kawaii before taking the course. Female American participants listed 46 smallness-related associations out of 152 total responses to cute while male participants marked 33 associations out of 116 entries. A deeper qualitative analysis reveals that they came to their own “understanding” of kawaii-ness after they were exposed to Japanese culture. Compared to Japanese participants, American participants identified something related to smallness as one of the most prominent factors of kawaii. For example, 23% of female and 14% of male participants identified a small and/or young trait as in babies, puppies, children, small things, baby animals, and other similar variations, in their top kawaii association. On the other hand, 10% of both female and male Japanese participants associated smallness as a trait.

Another notable response by American students is that they find kawaii-ness in manga and anime that they have seen. Characters were also seen as inherently Japanese (Pokémon, Hello Kitty, Rilakkuma, mascots, and so forth). These mediums seem to trigger the participants’ association with big eyes that may be perceived as a unique attribute to Japanese kawaii culture. There is only one association of “round eyes” under Human by a Japanese participant. Some American participants used “Japanese” to describe kawaii, which suggests that the concept of kawaii is not intuitive or ingrained but implemented. This explains that their associations are somewhat limited in scope, as Table 6 shows, while Japanese participants’ responses covered a wider range of attributes and associations.

5 Conclusion

The concept of kawaii has been globally introduced. However, it is not as richly contextualized in the United States as in Japan. On the other hand, the loanword “kyūto” is much more integrated into the Japanese lexicon, shown in Japanese participants’ broad associations. While both Japanese and American participants frequently associated adjectives with both cute and kawaii, the range of adjectives used by Americans was somewhat limited. Most notably, Americans often used adjectives related to smallness as associations for both cute and kawaii. This limited range of adjectives for American participants, as compared to Japanese participants, may suggest that the American concepts of cute and kawaii are not as broad as the Japanese version of these concepts. We can also speculate that cute is a part of kawaii in Japanese society, but in the US, kawaii is a partly shared concept with cute. In fact, in English we often describe kawaii as a “Japanese style of cuteness” which suggests it is a special type of cuteness that has some intersection with American cuteness but may not be a subset of it.